I dropped by log analysis software vendor Splunk a few weeks ago for a chat with Marketing VP Steve Sommer (who some you may know from Cognos and/or Informix), Product Management VP Christina Noren, and above all co-founder/CTO Erik Swan. Splunk turns out to be a pretty interesting company, from both business and technical standpoints. For one thing, Splunk seems highly regarded by most people I mention it to.

Splunk’s technical stories include:

Text search over log files.

Business intelligence over text search. (That part sounds a lot like Attivio.)

Splunk has ~1200 paying customers, and is adding a couple hundred more per quarter.

Splunk has ~160 people.

~80% of Splunk sales are in North America.

Typical Splunk sales prices are in the $10-50K range, with an average around $25K, or maybe that average is a bit over $30K. Some Splunk deals are six- or even seven-figure.

Splunk is “quite profitable.”

Splunk’s eponymous product is priced according to how much data is indexed per day. If you index half a gigabyte of logs per day or less, Splunk is completely free. So, while Splunk is closed-source, there’s something of an open-source-like Splunk adoption model.

Splunk has been selling product for a couple of years. I gather Splunk 4 was recently released.